It wasn't real spaceflight, but it was the next best thing. For a short time on Thursday, Professor Stephen Hawking got to experience weightlessness aboard a specially modified Boeing 727 jet. Normally confined to a wheelchair because of his motor neuron disease, he was able to float free, tended by a team of doctors, nurses and flight staff.
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When we look into the skies with our eyes, we see in the visible spectrum. Although objects can look beautiful, it's only a fraction of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. To really see and understand the Universe, you'll want to look in different regions of the spectrum. The three great observatories: Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra, have teamed up to spotlight the Sombrero Galaxy (aka M104) in three different wavelengths.
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This beautiful photograph taken by Cassini shows the rings of Saturn, lit by the Sun from below. The sunlight bounces off the rings' opposite side and illuminates Saturn's night side. It's amazing to think that a photograph like this could only be taken from Cassini's current perspective, 33 degrees above the ringplane; here on Earth, we're stuck with the tilt of the rings that Saturn presents to us.
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As you may know, our Sun follows a relatively predictable 11-year cycle of solar activity. During the solar minimum, there's very little activity, and only a handful of sunspots. During the solar maximum, there can be frequent and powerful coronal mass ejections and X-ray flares.
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If you're a newly forming star system, there's no better place to be than a stellar nursery. All those raw elements make the perfect building blocks of stars and planets. The problem is that super hot giant stars can release great torrents of radiation, blasting away newly forming planets.
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Buying your first telescope can be a nerve-wracking experience filled with buyer's remorse. This week we discuss the basics of purchasing your first binoculars and telescope. What to look for, how to clean older equipment, and how to use it for the first time. Let's make sure your first investment in this wonderful hobby is money well-spent.
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Thanks to Einstein, we know that matter and energy are just different versions of one another. E=mc2 tells you how much energy you'd get if you converted mass into energy. Don't try, it's hard. Physicists were concerned that all matter in the Universe would eventually decay into radiation after trillions and trillions of years of time.
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Great big Jupiter-like planets are one thing, but the Holy Grail of extrasolar planetary discover is going to be another Earth – complete with life. We're not there yet, but astronomers announced the next best thing yesterday: a roughly Earth-mass planet orbiting within the habitable zone of its parent star. In other words, liquid water could exist on this rocky planet.
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Monday, April 23 – Pioneer quantum physicist Max Planck was born on this day in 1858. In 1900, Max developed the Planck equation to explain the shape of blackbody spectra (a function of temperature and wavelength of emission). A "blackbody" is any object that absorbs all incident radiation – regardless of wavelength. For example, heated metal has blackbody properties because the energy it radiates is thermal. The blackbody spectrum's shape remains constant, and the peak and height of an emitter can be measured against it – be it cosmic background radiation or our own bodies.
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A steady progression of space borne and Earth-based telescopes bring long ago, far away events into our common perspective. We take these images, massage and arrange the hard won data, and, develop new interpretations of our existence and surroundings. Paul Halpern and Paul Wesson in their book Brave New Universe – Illuminating the Darkest Secrets of the Cosmos lay bare recent theories and postulations resulting from this. As they show, new information, when added to the mix, can as easily validate as confuse current prognoses.
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NASA's newest solar observatories have released their first images of the Sun, and they're great. Of course, to really enjoy the pictures, you'll need 3-D glasses.
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The two crewmembers of Expedition 14 returned to Earth on Saturday, with astro-tourist Charles Simonyi along for the ride. Commander Mike Lopez-Alegria and Flight Engineer Mikhail Tyurin had been aboard the International Space Station since September 20th, while Simonyi arrived on April 7th. Their Soyuz TMA-9 capsule touched down in the Central Asian steppes of Kazakhstan at 1231 GMT (8:31 am EDT).
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It's hard to believe, but the Hubble Space Telescope has been churning out discovery after discovery for 17 years now. To celebrate the anniversary, NASA and ESA released a high-resolution image taken by Hubble of the Carina Nebula. And what a photograph!
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You've heard it all before. Black holes pull with a gravity so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. You would think that black holes are the place where everything goes to die, but it might be possible that black holes are the source of life as well.
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Trillions of neutrinos are produced in our Sun through its nuclear reactions. These particles stream out at nearly the speed of light, and pass right through any matter they encounter. In fact, there are billions of them passing through your body right now. Learn how this elusive particle was first theorized and finally discovered.
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